windRose: Traditional wind rose plot

In openair: Tools for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data

Traditional wind rose plot

Description

The traditional wind rose plot that plots wind speed and wind direction by different intervals. The pollution rose applies the same plot structure but substitutes other measurements, most commonly a pollutant time series, for wind speed.

Usage

windRose(
  mydata,
  ws = "ws",
  wd = "wd",
  ws2 = NA,
  wd2 = NA,
  ws.int = 2,
  angle = 30,
  type = "default",
  calm.thresh = 0,
  bias.corr = TRUE,
  cols = "default",
  grid.line = NULL,
  width = 0.9,
  seg = 0.9,
  auto.text = TRUE,
  breaks = 4,
  offset = 10,
  normalise = FALSE,
  max.freq = NULL,
  paddle = TRUE,
  key.title = "(m/s)",
  key.position = "bottom",
  strip.position = "top",
  dig.lab = 5,
  include.lowest = FALSE,
  statistic = "prop.count",
  pollutant = NULL,
  annotate = TRUE,
  angle.scale = 315,
  border = NA,
  plot = TRUE,
  key = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

mydata	A data frame containing fields ws and wd
ws	Name of the column representing wind speed.
wd	Name of the column representing wind direction.
ws2, wd2	The user can supply a second set of wind speed and wind direction values with which the first can be compared. See pollutionRose() for more details.
ws.int	The Wind speed interval. Default is 2 m/s but for low met masts with low mean wind speeds a value of 1 or 0.5 m/s may be better.
angle	Default angle of “spokes” is 30. Other potentially useful angles are 45 and 10. Note that the width of the wind speed interval may need adjusting using width.
type	Character string(s) defining how data should be split/conditioned before plotting. "default" produces a single panel using the entire dataset. Any other options will split the plot into different panels - a roughly square grid of panels if one type is given, or a 2D matrix of panels if two types are given. type is always passed to cutData(), and can therefore be any of: A built-in type defined in cutData() (e.g., "season", "year", "weekday", etc.). For example, type = "season" will split the plot into four panels, one for each season. The name of a numeric column in mydata, which will be split into n.levels quantiles (defaulting to 4). The name of a character or factor column in mydata, which will be used as-is. Commonly this could be a variable like "site" to ensure data from different monitoring sites are handled and presented separately. It could equally be any arbitrary column created by the user (e.g., whether a nearby possible pollutant source is active or not). Most openair plotting functions can take two type arguments. If two are given, the first is used for the columns and the second for the rows.
calm.thresh	By default, conditions are considered to be calm when the wind speed is zero. The user can set a different threshold for calms be setting calm.thresh to a higher value. For example, calm.thresh = 0.5 will identify wind speeds below 0.5 as calm.
bias.corr	When angle does not divide exactly into 360 a bias is introduced in the frequencies when the wind direction is already supplied rounded to the nearest 10 degrees, as is often the case. For example, if angle = 22.5, N, E, S, W will include 3 wind sectors and all other angles will be two. A bias correction can made to correct for this problem. A simple method according to Applequist (2012) is used to adjust the frequencies.
cols	Colours to use for plotting. Can be a pre-set palette (e.g., "turbo", "viridis", "tol", "Dark2", etc.) or a user-defined vector of R colours (e.g., c("yellow", "green", "blue", "black") - see colours() for a full list) or hex-codes (e.g., c("#30123B", "#9CF649", "#7A0403")). See openColours() for more details.
grid.line	Grid line interval to use. If NULL, as in default, this is assigned based on the available data range. However, it can also be forced to a specific value, e.g. grid.line = 10. grid.line can also be a list to control the interval, line type and colour. For example grid.line = list(value = 10, lty = 5, col = "purple").
width	For paddle = TRUE, the adjustment factor for width of wind speed intervals. For example, width = 1.5 will make the paddle width 1.5 times wider.
seg	seg determines with width of the segments. For example, seg = 0.5 will produce segments 0.5 * angle.
auto.text	Either TRUE (default) or FALSE. If TRUE titles and axis labels will automatically try and format pollutant names and units properly, e.g., by subscripting the "2" in "NO2". Passed to quickText().
breaks	Most commonly, the number of break points for wind speed. With the ws.int default of 2 m/s, the breaks default, 4, generates the break points 2, 4, 6, 8 m/s. However, breaks can also be used to set specific break points. For example, the argument breaks = c(0, 1, 10, 100) breaks the data into segments <1, 1-10, 10-100, >100.
offset	offset controls the size of the 'hole' in the middle and is expressed on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is no hole and 100 is a hole that takes up the entire plotting area.
normalise	If TRUE each wind direction segment is normalised to equal one. This is useful for showing how the concentrations (or other parameters) contribute to each wind sector when the proportion of time the wind is from that direction is low. A line showing the probability that the wind directions is from a particular wind sector is also shown.
max.freq	Controls the scaling used by setting the maximum value for the radial limits. This is useful to ensure several plots use the same radial limits.
paddle	Either TRUE or FALSE. If TRUE plots rose using 'paddle' style spokes. If FALSE plots rose using 'wedge' style spokes.
key.title	Used to set the title of the legend. The legend title is passed to quickText() if auto.text = TRUE.
key.position	Location where the legend is to be placed. Allowed arguments include "top", "right", "bottom", "left" and "none", the last of which removes the legend entirely.
strip.position	Location where the facet 'strips' are located when using type. When one type is provided, can be one of "left", "right", "bottom" or "top". When two types are provided, this argument defines whether the strips are "switched" and can take either "x", "y", or "both". For example, "x" will switch the 'top' strip locations to the bottom of the plot.
dig.lab	The number of significant figures at which scientific number formatting is used in break point and key labelling. Default 5.
include.lowest	Logical. If FALSE (the default), the first interval will be left exclusive and right inclusive. If TRUE, the first interval will be left and right inclusive. Passed to the include.lowest argument of cut().
statistic	The statistic to be applied to each data bin in the plot. Options currently include “prop.count”, “prop.mean” and “abs.count”. The default “prop.count” sizes bins according to the proportion of the frequency of measurements. Similarly, “prop.mean” sizes bins according to their relative contribution to the mean. “abs.count” provides the absolute count of measurements in each bin.
pollutant	Alternative data series to be sampled instead of wind speed. The windRose() default NULL is equivalent to pollutant = "ws". Use in pollutionRose().
annotate	If TRUE then the percentage calm and mean values are printed in each panel together with a description of the statistic below the plot. If FALSE then only the statistic will be printed.
angle.scale	In radial plots (e.g., polarPlot()), the radial scale is drawn directly on the plot itself. While suitable defaults have been chosen, sometimes the placement of the scale may interfere with an interesting feature. angle.scale can take any value between 0 and 360 to place the scale at a different angle, or FALSE to move it to the side of the plots.
border	Border colour for shaded areas. Default is no border.
plot	When openair plots are created they are automatically printed to the active graphics device. plot = FALSE deactivates this behaviour. This may be useful when the plot data is of more interest, or the plot is required to appear later (e.g., later in a Quarto document, or to be saved to a file).
key	Deprecated; please use key.position. If FALSE, sets key.position to "none".
...	Addition options are passed on to cutData() for type handling. Some additional arguments are also available: xlab, ylab and main override the x-axis label, y-axis label, and plot title. layout sets the layout of facets - e.g., layout(2, 5) will have 2 columns and 5 rows. fontsize overrides the overall font size of the plot.

Details

For windRose data are summarised by direction, typically by 45 or 30 (or 10) degrees and by different wind speed categories. Typically, wind speeds are represented by different width "paddles". The plots show the proportion (here represented as a percentage) of time that the wind is from a certain angle and wind speed range.

By default windRose will plot a windRose in using "paddle" style segments and placing the scale key below the plot.

The argument pollutant uses the same plotting structure but substitutes another data series, defined by pollutant, for wind speed. It is recommended to use pollutionRose() for plotting pollutant concentrations.

The option statistic = "prop.mean" provides a measure of the relative contribution of each bin to the panel mean, and is intended for use with pollutionRose.

Value

an openair object. Summarised proportions can be extracted directly using the ⁠$data⁠ operator, e.g. object$data for output <- windRose(mydata). This returns a data frame with three set columns: cond, conditioning based on type; wd, the wind direction; and calm, the statistic for the proportion of data unattributed to any specific wind direction because it was collected under calm conditions; and then several (one for each range binned for the plot) columns giving proportions of measurements associated with each ws or pollutant range plotted as a discrete panel.

Author(s)

David Carslaw

Karl Ropkins

Jack Davison

References

Applequist, S, 2012: Wind Rose Bias Correction. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 51, 1305-1309.

Droppo, J.G. and B.A. Napier (2008) Wind Direction Bias in Generating Wind Roses and Conducting Sector-Based Air Dispersion Modeling, Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 58:7, 913-918.

See Also

Other polar directional analysis functions: percentileRose(), polarAnnulus(), polarCluster(), polarDiff(), polarFreq(), polarPlot(), pollutionRose()

Examples

# basic plot
windRose(mydata)

# one windRose for each year
windRose(mydata, type = "year")

# windRose in 10 degree intervals with gridlines and width adjusted
## Not run: 
windRose(mydata, angle = 10, width = 0.2, grid.line = 1)

## End(Not run)

openair documentation built on April 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.